So atheists can recover in Alcoholics Anonymous as well!

[Daily Telegraph - Published: 12:01AM BST 26 Aug 2006]

"Bill Linskey, more commonly known as "Dartmoor Bill", who died on Tuesday aged 85, was the longest-sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous in Britain and Europe, having not touched a drink for the past 53 years.

While serving with the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, Linskey survived two sinkings and a shipwreck; his life later fell apart due to alcoholism and he served five years in Dartmoor prison for assault, emerging in May 1953 with the conviction that he must never drink again. The first British AA meeting had been held on March 31 1947 at the Dorchester Hotel in London. By 1953 there were only four in the capital (today there are more than 700), and Linskey found one in Chandos Street, behind the Edgware Road. He immersed himself in AA's "12 Steps", and remained sober. By the 1960s he was a husband and father, making a living as a street-trader; he also trained as an electrician and found stage-lighting work around the West End theatres.

Concerned that there was no established AA meeting in the East End, where problem-drinking was endemic, Linskey made it his mission to make the Fellowship better known. In March 1965 he and a fellow-member called at Toynbee Hall, the charity based near the Aldgate. The Warden, Walter Birmingham, heard them out, then showed them into an ornate hall with magnificent oil paintings and leather armchairs; would this do for a meeting place? When Linskey protested that AA could not possibly afford to rent such a place Birmingham said they could have it for nothing. Linskey explained that AA insisted on being self-supporting, and a nominal rent was agreed.

For many months, Bill and a fellow recovering alcoholic, the actor Robert Urquhart, occupied two comfortable chairs around a table waiting for people to come. At first no one did. But the two men persevered, and gradually the meeting attracted people with a drinking problem. The Toynbee Hall meeting continues today, every Wednesday night. In March last year it celebrated its 40th anniversary, the members raising a soft drink to Dartmoor Bill.

William Linskey was born on February 24 1921 into the poverty of Jarrow. His mother died when he was seven, and aged 14 he went to London in an unsuccessful attempt to find work. On the outbreak of war he joined the Merchant Navy, stoking the engines in supply ships. He was unsurpassed as a bare-knuckle boxer, both on board ship and in the rougher ports at home and abroad. Linskey survived the sinking in the South Atlantic of the Ashby, which was torpedoed 200 miles from land. He and a few others spent seven days and nights in an open lifeboat until a clever young first mate steered them to the Azores with a compass.

Next Linskey served on the Arctic convoys carrying cargoes of food and weapons to the Soviet Union. He worked on Russian soil, unloading ships in Archangel after enduring hazardous voyages across the North Atlantic.

When a torpedo sank the Empire Beaumont, part of the convoy PQ18, Linskey was again lucky to survive. He was picked up by a Russian trawler and taken back to Archangel, where he learned Russian and acquired a taste for moonshine vodka. In an attempt to get back to Britain, he signed on to an American ship, whose skipper was even better acquainted with vodka than Linskey. The ship hit an iceberg and sank; again a Russian ship came to the rescue. In 1995 Linskey was one of 200 seamen taken to Murmansk and honoured with a medal for their part in what the Russians call the "Great Patriotic War". Linskey was discharged from the Merchant Navy in 1943, probably suffering from what would now be recognised as post-traumatic stress syndrome. His wartime marriage to Mary McAlinden collapsed, and for four years he led a nomadic existence, drinking heavily, until he was sent to Dartmoor for his part in a drunken assault.

"I was not, by nature, a violent man," he later said, "but drinking changed me. I was fortunate that Wyn [his second wife, Winifred Riddell] stayed with me, and we married soon after I completed the full term in prison, much of it in solitary."

Although Linskey remained an atheist, he came to believe in what he viewed as the many "miracles" seen at AA meetings as alcoholics managed to achieve sobriety. When Wyn died from leukaemia in 1967 he had been sober for 13 years, and he found no strong temptation to drown his sorrows. He met his third wife, Eunice, at Toynbee Hall in 1967, and they married in the same year.

Dartmoor Bill reached his half-century of sobriety in May 2003, and hundreds of AA members celebrated with him at a party given by Eunice at a church hall in Chelsea. Despite the onset of asbestosis, he spoke loud and clear for half an hour, regaling the company with his experience and sense of hope, insisting: "If you don't take the first drink, you can't get drunk."

He is survived by his third wife, and by a daughter of his second marriage."

(See also: "No Longer Required: My war in the merchant marine" by Bill Linskey - Published by Pisces Press 1999, ISBN 0 9537285 0 1)